Selma is the latest in an ever lengthening list of propaganda films in the politically correct interest. It is Alabama 1965. Martin Luther King is already internationally famous after his “I have a dream “ speech in 1963 and the award of the Nobel Peace prize in 1964. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is meeting with resistance and black voters are finding they still cannot register to vote because of the application of local electoral regulations in ways which are comically restrictive. King goes to the city of Selma with a clutch of supporters from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to protest about this thwarting of the law, but their attempts to help blacks register in the city fail. As a consequence a protest march from Selma to Montgomery , the Alabama state capital, is planned. The first march is stopped brutally, the second aborted by King and the third allowed to happen.

That is the skeleton of the film. There is precious little solid dramatic flesh put on the skeleton. To be brutally frank Selma is boring. It is too wordy, too cluttered with characters, too didactic and unremittingly earnest. These are qualities guaranteed to lose any cinema audience. The problem is particularly acute when, as here, there is an large cast. Disputes and debates between King and his supporters or between King and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) are so extended and detailed that anyone not familiar with the story would not know what to make of it and, in any case, as anyone who has ever been involved with an ideologically driven political group will be only too aware, of little interest to anyone who has not been captured by the ideology. Reflecting life too exactly on film is not always the best way to keep people’s attention. Propaganda films do not have to be boring, although they often are. The black director Spike Lee would have made a much less sprawling and vastly more watchable film whilst keeping the ideological message.

There is also a woeful and wilful lack of historical context. This one has at its core a vision of wicked Southern good ol’ boys oppressing blacks. White involvement is restricted to racists with a penchant for violence, a few white sympathisers with the civil rights movement who appear peripherally, adorned with looks of sublimely smug unquestioning utopian naivety not see on film since the initial sighting of a hippy commune in Easy Rider and Lyndon Johnson who is shown as sympathetic to King’s views but not interested enough to risk his political future by wholeheartedly embracing the legislation which King says is necessary . There is no attempt to see things from the viewpoint of the whites who opposed integration, unlike, for example, a film such as In the Heat of the Night in which Rod Steiger’s sheriff attempts to explain why whites in the South are as they are because of their circumstances, for example, their widely held and not unreasonable fear that a black population which has been suppressed may turn on whites . Instead Selma just rushes in and points the finger of moral shame at any white who does not uncritically embrace what King advocates with a complete disregard from the fact that every human being morally and sociologically has to start from the situation into which they are born.

The concentration of the film on a specific time and place is also problematic, because King’s ideological career was a far more complex thing than the film can show. It also removes the embarrassment which would have hung around a straightforward biopic of King, such as the plagiarism which gained him a doctorate and his marginalisation as a civil rights leader which eventually saw him reduced to going to support sewage workers at the time of his assassination. Mention is made of his gross womanising, but only in the context of a sex tape recorded by the FBI which was sent to King’s wife Cora. The fact that some who were close to him said he had a particular liking for white women – which could be taken as evidence of racism in King if his motive was to revenge himself on whites by abusing their women – goes unmentioned . Indeed, it is rather odd that a man as celebrated as King is in the USA and with a worldwide reputation should never have had a full blown biopic. Perhaps the answer is that King’s private life was too messy to deal with in a film depicting his entire public life rather than a short period of it devoted to a specific subject.

More importantly the tight focus in Selma means that the fifty odd years since Selma go unexamined. No honest person would deny that the position of blacks in the USA and particularly those in the Old South was demeaning at the beginning of the 1960s, but is what has replaced segregation and Jim Crow laws really that much better for most blacks or, perhaps more pertinently, anywhere near what King hoped would happen? Perhaps the answer to the first question is a tepid yes, at least for blacks who have benefitted from “positive discrimination”, but it has to be an unequivocal no to the latter. Segregation by choice has replaced segregation by law. Illegitimacy and crime amongst blacks has rocketed. A fair case could be made for the individual personal relationship between whites and blacks being worse now that it was fifty years ago.

Tom Wilkinson is very decent LBJ but David Oyelowo does not quite cut it as King. It is not that it is technically a bad performance, it is simply that he does not capture the charisma that King undoubtedly had. His portrayal of King keeps a question nagging away at one: why would any one have followed this rather drab character? The rest of the cast do not really have time to develop their roles, although Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King and Tim Roth as George Wallace have their moments.

The insubstantial quality of the film can be judged by the meagre Oscar recognition and its popularity with the public by the money it has taken. The film was nominated for Best Picture and best song but for nothing else, which is a rather remarkable thing. Nor did it win as best picture. A public fuss was made about Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo being left out of Best Director and Best Actor categories, but only in the context of no black actors and directors being nominated. Considering the public political correctness the American film business emits, it is rather difficult to imagine that the tepid response to Selma by the Oscar granting Academy voters was the result of racism. In fact its nomination as Best Picture despite having no nominations in the directing and acting categories suggests that the opposite happened, Selma was nominated for Best Picture regardless of its mediocrity as a sop to political correctness.

The public also responded in less than passionate fashion. As of 16 April Selma had taken $52,076,908 worldwide which placed it 57th in the top grossing films of the previous 365 days. Not bad in purely commercial terms for a film which cost $20 million to make, but distinctly underwhelming for a film lauded to the skies by most critics and many public figures. The truth is that people both in the States and abroad have not been that drawn to it, whether because of the subject or the indifferent quality of the film. One can take the browbeaten horses of the Western world to the politically correct water but they can’t make many of them drink.

The pernicious nature of a film like this is not that it casts whites as the villain, but that it gives blacks and excuse for anything that goes wrong in their lives, the prize of an inexhaustible victimhood

Like this:

The French writer Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints describes a situation not unlike that of the present exodus from North Africa and the Middle East. In Raspail’s book the invasion is by large ships crammed with Third World migrants coming to Europe where the ships are beached and the migrants flood into Europe, a Europe which has lost the will to resist because of decades of politically correct internationalist propaganda. Europe and eventually the entire developed world falls to the invasion of the Third World hordes who are armed only with their misery and the Pavlovian response of First World populations brainwashed to believe that they collectively are to blame for third world ills and who consequently cannot morally deny the invaders entry to their lands.. This is the scenario which is now being acted out in the Mediterranean, but with, in the main, small boats, rather than large ones carrying the mi grants.

The stark truth is that mass immigration is invasion resulting in the effective colonisation of parts of the invaded country because immigrants from a similar background have a pronounced tendency to congregate in the same area. Any other description of mass immigration is wilfully dishonest. It is as reasonable for a people to resist invasion by mass immigration as it is to an invasion by an armed invader.

Anti-immigration parties are on the rise because all over the developed world their elites have ignored the wishes of their people and forced mass immigration on them. In Britain (and many other first world countries) this has been accompanied by the increasingly punitive application of the criminal law to those who protest about mass immigration and its effects.

The promotion of mass immigration is a particularly deep treason, because unlike an invasion by military force the legions of the immigrant army are disparate and cannot be readily expelled. Where mass immigration is deliberately promoted by a government, as happened under Blair according to ex-No 10 advisor Andrew Neather, to deliberately change the nature of a society (in Neather’s words, “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”) it is the most contemptible of treasons.

Mass immigration is a form of theft by the elites who permit it. It robs a people of their collective and individual sense of national security and an enjoyment of a culture and history in which all share. Mundanely it steals from it people, and especially the poor, the things which are necessary for a decent life: housing at a decent price, schools which are near to where children live and which do not boast “96 languages are spoken here”, ready access to GPs and hospital treatment and well paid jobs which have not had their wages suppressed through immigrant labour. The whole business is made even more repulsive because the elites who inflict this on their people take good care to live in very white, and in England, very English, worlds whilst incessantly extolling the joy of diversity. These people know precisely what they are inflicting on others.

The answer to the migrants flooding across the Mediterranean is very simple, spend money on surveillance methods such as drones and satellites and a substantial fleet of fast manoeuvrable ships which can patrol the Mediterranean and intercept immigrant laden boats and ships and tow them back from whence they came. The ideal would be to unload the migrants and then destroy the ships.

It is also probable that the drone and satellite surveillance would provide information on where human traffickers are assembling their passengers and where the boats likely to be used to transport them are harboured. If so, action could be taken by the Western powers to destroy their boats whilst in harbour. Lest there be a wail against Western states interfering with Third World countries, those contemplating such a complaint should reflect on the palpable fact that the states from which the migrants are coming are either failed states or are actively conniving with the traffickers to get migrants from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe.

If such a scheme t cost a billion pounds a year it would be cheap at the price. In fact if it cost ten billion a year it would be cheap. Such a scheme would be undeniably practical. All that is required is the political will, of elites and the governed in the West, to cast aside the politically correct mentality which says people must be allowed to come, must be saved from perils into they have placed themselves, regardless of the cost to the Western societies who have until now been expected to take them in.

Robert Henderson

Emma West was arrested in November 2011 after she protested about immigration whilst travelling on a bus. Her protest was captured on video and uploaded to YouTube as well as being copied by many national media outlets. The video was viewed millions of times.

Following the upload of the video Emma was arrested, held in the UK’s highest security prison for women , released and then subjected to a year and a half’s intimidation by the state as the powers-that-be desperately tried to get her to plead guilty to charges relating to racially motivated serious crimes (racially aggravated intentional harassment and racially aggravated assault) which would have almost certainly sent her to prison. Eventually, worn down by the stress she pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress.

I say Emma’s outburst was a protest against immigration because that is precisely what it is. Here are some of her comments:

She says: “What’s this country coming too?

“A load of black people and and load of f***ing Polish.”

One commuter challenges West, who rounds on him telling him: “You aren’t English”, to which he replies “No, I’m not”

She then scans the tram, pointing out people one-by-one, saying: “You ain’t English, you ain’t English, None of you are f***ing English.

“Get back to your own f***ing countries.”

“Britain is nothing now, Britain is f***k all.

“My Britain is f**k all now.”

You can argue that is foulmouthed, but you cannot argue it is anything but a protest against immigration. In fact, it is the most grass-root form of political protest there is, namely, directly engaging with the effects of policy.

Emma lives in a country which has been made unrecognisable by the permitting of mass immigration for over sixty years. Neither Emma nor any other native English man or woman (or Briton come to that) has had any say in this invasion of the country. This most fundamental act of treason has been committed by generations of British politicians who to date have got away with their crime. But to continue to get away with the crime the guilty men and women need to suppress public protest against what they have done. That is why the authorities were so desperate to get to plead guilty. She was a refusnik and they could not let that pass. That she resorted to foul language in her frustration is entirely understandable.

“It clearly has the capacity to bring the profession into disrepute and to undermine public confidence in its standards.

“Furthermore, her violent and abusive conduct would demonstrate a real risk to the safety of patients.

“In relation to her racially aggravated offence, this was committed in a public setting and received further public exposure, as a person had uploaded the video clip to the internet which has been viewed extensively.”

So there you have it, political correctness can not only send you into the clutches of the law but take your means of living away.

Robert Henderson Emma West has finally been worn down. Eighteen months after she was charged with racially aggravated intentional harassment and racially aggravated assault , she has agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of racially aggravated harassment, alarm … Continue reading →

Robert Henderson Emma West was due to stand trial at Croydon Crown Court for two racially aggravated public order offences arising from her complaint about mass immigration and its effects made on a Croydon tram in November 2011 . The … Continue reading →

Robert Henderson A fifth, yes that’s fifth, date for the start of Emma West’s trial on criminal charges arising from her complaint about mass immigration and its effects made on a Croydon tram in November 2011 has been set for … Continue reading →

Robert Henderson It is now 14 months since Emma West was charged with racially aggravated public order offences after she got into an argument on a tram which led her to make loud complaint about the effects of mass immigration. … Continue reading →

Robert Henderson Emma West appeared at Croydon magistrates court on 3rd January. She will stand trial on two racially aggravated public order offences, one with intent to cause fear. She will next appear in court – Croydon Crown Court – … Continue reading →

Emma West of New Addington, London has been arrested and placed in “protective custody” following the publication on YouTube of a two minute 25 second recording labelled by the YouTube poster as “Racist British Woman on the Tram goes CRAZY …Continue reading →

Director Amma AsanteThis is a straightforward propaganda film in the politically correct interest, the particular interest being that of racial prejudice and slavery. It is the latest in a slew of such films over the past few years, most notably Django Unchained, Lincoln and 12 Years a slave. More generally, it is an example of the well-practiced trick of taking of a black person from history and elevating them way beyond their importance simply because they are black – the attempt to place Mary Seacole on a par with Florence Nightingale comes to mind.

Belle is set in the middle of the eighteenth century and is based extremely loosely on a true story, the looseness being aided by the fact that information about Dido is very scanty, resting almost entirely on entries in the accounts of the house in which she is raised (Kenwood House in Hampstead) and diary entries made by the one-time Governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson who was a guest in 1789.

The story told in the film is this, around 1764 the Lord Chief Justice of England, the Earl of Mansfield , takes into his household a very young mixed race girl Dido Belle. She is the bastard child of a slave Mary Belle and Mansfield’s nephew Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode). The girl is legally a slave by birth, but is treated as a freewoman once she is in England. Rather oddly Lindsay is portrayed as absolutely doting on the child then vanishes entirely from the film despite the fact that he lived for another quarter century.

The Mansfields have no children of their own. When Dido arrives, they have already taken in her cousin, Elizabeth Murray, great niece to Lord Mansfield. Elizabeth and Dido grow up together, in the film, supposedly as playmates and equals. This idea is largely derived from a portrait painted of the two girls in their middle teens by an artist originally thought to be Zoffany, but now relegated to by anonymous. The composition of the painting suggests that equality was not quite the relationship. The picture does have Elizabeth resting a hand on Dido, but shows Elizabeth ahead of the girl. In addition, Dido is carrying a basket with fruit and is dressed as the type of exotic ethnic human curiosity much favoured in paintings in the 18th century, the exoticism being signalled not only by her race but the fact that she is sporting a turban. Such touches suggest subordination. The Kenwood accounts book support this by showing Elizabeth receiving an allowance of £100 a year and Dido only £30. Her position was indeterminate, above a servant but below a unashamed relative.

The film ignores such details. Dido is presented not merely as the natural equal of her cousin Elizabeth Murray, but judged on her merits and circumstances, as more desirable. Her social status is elevated . She is described as an heiress with a fortune of £2,000 (worth £300,000 at 2014 prices) left her by her father. This is simply untrue. Dido inherited a half share of £1,000 from her father and was left £500 and an annuity of £100 pa in Mansfield’s will, but this was years after the events covered by the film – her father died in 1788 and Mansfield in 1793. In the film Dido as a girl of twenty or so is represented as being a prize in the marriage stakes because of the fictitious fortune, while Elizabeth Murray is portrayed as the young woman in danger of being left on the shelf because, the film tells us, she has no fortune. In fact, Elizabeth was an heiress with the added lure of being the daughter of an earl.

To give substance to the idea that Dido is the better marriageable property, the film has the son of a peer Oliver Ashford ( James Norton) wooing and eventually proposing to Dido. His brother James (Tom Felton) objects on the grounds of her race and (mildly) physically assaults Dido. Several other members of the Ashford family also take exception to the match. There is absolutely no evidence for such a romance and it is most improbable that someone of Ashford’s social standing would have thought of such a match, let alone carried it through to the point of a proposal.

To this improbable confection is added the portrayal of the person who marries her. The name of the person John Davinier is true to life, but that is as far as reality extends. In the film Davinier is depicted as English, the son of a vicar and a budding lawyer who initially is taken under Mansfield’s patronage. In real life Davinier was French, the son of a servant, who worked as a steward or possibly even as a valet. That he was thought a suitable match for Dido points firmly to her social inferiority.

The second half of the film is largely devoted to Dido working to influence Lord Mansfield over a suit relating to slaves. In 1783 Mansfield has to give a judgement in a case involving the slaveship Zong and her insurers. The insurance claim is made after the cargo of slaves are thrown overboard with the ship owners claiming necessity on the grounds that the ship was running dangerously short of water and could not make landfall to take on water before the entire ship ‘s company was put in danger. Davinier in the film is depicted as fervent anti-slaver who persuades Belle to get hold of some papers from Mansfield which proves that the Zong owner’s story is false. There is no evidence for Dido’s involvement in the matter and as Davinier is a fictitious character as far as the film is concerned, his involvement is a nonsense.

Next there is the dramatic treatment of Mansfield’s denial of the Zong insurance claim as a triumph for the anti-slavers. In fact Mansfield’s judgement was a very narrow and legalistic one. He did not proceed on the grounds that a slave could not be treated as property to be disposed of at the slave-owners will. All he did was rule that the insurance claim was invalid because the ship’s captain did not have the reason of necessity for his decision to throw the slaves overboard. The film does include this judgment but overlaid it with anti-slavery rhetoric by having Mansfield quote in the Zong action his earlier judgement in a slave case – that of the slave Somerset t in 1772. There Mansfield ruled that slavery in England could not exist because “The state of slavery . . . is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law” and freed Somersett, the positive law not existing. The Somersett case is actually a better platform on which to put the antislavery case, but was foregone because Belle would have been at most ten when the case came to court and could not have been portrayed as taking a role in influencing the judgement other than by her mere existence.

There is also an attempt to paint Britain as being greatly dependent economically on the slave trade and the use of slaves in some of the colonies. On a number of occasions it is stated that Britain would be ruined if slavery was undermined. This was indeed a claim made by those benefitting from slavery but it was not the general opinion of the country, nor does it meet the facts. Hugh Thomas in his The Slave Trade estimates that by the second half of the 18th century the returns on slaving were no better than that of many other cargoes.

Simply judged as an theatrical experience the film fails. Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido presents two problems. The first is her acting which is horribly flat. Theatrically speaking, she was no more than a blank sheet to be passively written upon, a politically correct banner to be waved at the audience. The second difficulty concerns her looks and demeanour. Frankly, to this reviewer’s eyes at least ,she is not the irresistible beauty the film suggests and in this role lacks feminine charm. Ironically, her portrayal may well be true to life, for Thomas Hutchinson describes her as “neither handsome nor genteel – pert enough”.

To that difficulty can be added the fact that so much has been made of the painting of Dido and Elizabeth the filmgoer goes to the cinema with a firm idea of what Dido looked like. The painting shows her to have Caucasian features, which bear a strong resemblance to those her father if his portrait is anything to go by. Mbatha-Raw looks so utterly different from the portrait of Dido that her appearance becomes disconcerting.

There is a further point related to her looks. The painting of Dido and Elizabeth Murray shows Dido to have been distinctly Caucasian in her facial features with a light brown colouring. Mbath-Raw, who has a white mother and black father, has little hint of Caucasian features and is rather darker in complexion. Interestingly, in Twelve Years a Slave the same difficulty arises, with the central character Solomon Northup in a contemporary depiction also possessing strongly Caucasian features, while the actor playing him had no such facial characteristics. This is not a trivial flaw because it is probable that the more like the dominant racial type in a society , the readier the acceptance of the person by white society, even in such a status conscious time as the 18th century. Could it be that the casting directors in films such as Belle and Twelve Years a Slave are consciously or unconsciously influenced by the idea that black actors and actresses should not look too white?

An impressive cast of established English character actors surround Mbatha-Raw and the film looks very pretty, but it is dull, very very dull. This is for the same reason that 12 Years a Slave is s dull. it presents only one side of a story in a very preachy manner. There is scarcely a moment when the viewer does not feel they are being told what to think. The slew of first rate English character actors do their best with the meagre fare they have been given, but even the best of actors cannot make a dull script excite.

It is unreasonable to expect an historical film to religiously abide by the details of a complicated story because of the pressure of time and the need for dramatic impact. What is unforgiveable is the wilful misrepresentation of a person or event to satisfy an ideological bent. Belle does this in the most blatant fashion. Because racial prejudice has been elevated to the great blasphemy of our times, the film is not merely wrong but dangerous in its one-eyed nature and misrepresentations.

Any Questions (BBC R4 1 August 2014 ) included a question on whether immigration had made Britain poorer. The question provoked an extended debate which would have been much longer if the chairman had not cut the discussion short.

Both the time devoted to the question in the show and the fact that every poll shows immigration to be at or near the top of the public’s current political concerns should have made it one of the primary subjects of the following Any Answers. The reverse happened.

First, the presenter Anita Anand put the question down the batting order as she introduced Any Answers by asking for questions on the subjects discussed – she placed it very near the end – then she took just one call with 29 minutes of the thirty minute programme, a call which lasted a few seconds.

There is no reasonable explanation for the failure to relegate the question to a point where it virtually vanished from Any Answers. The one caller who got on did complain about the late introduction of the question and was fobbed off with the usual BBC excuse of the weight of calls on other subjects driving it down the list. The excuse was particularly absurd in this case because the interest immigration provokes. It is reasonable to believe that the BBC deliberately kept callers about immigration off the air to further their own political agenda. The fact that Anand ancestry is subcontinental adds to the suspicion.

As the BBC is a closed shop when it comes to how prospective callers to are chosen, there is no way to get an independent check on what they are doing. It is also true that they operate of telephone system which blocks out callers deemed to be a nuisance – details below.

Please investigate how the BBC chooses who shall be put on air during phone-ins and how the extraordinary treatment of immigration on this Any Answers programme occurred. I would be delighted to come on to Feedback to question whoever the BBC puts up to justify their behaviour.

I have submitted a complaint to Roger Bolton at the BBC’s Feedback programme. The email for those wishing to complain is feedback@bbc.co.uk.

The Commons Select Committee (CSC) on Education has produced a report on the underachievement of white British working-class children. This ostensibly highlights the poor educational performance of white British children who are eligible for free meals (FSM) compared to those in receipt of FSM from ethnic minority groups such as those of Indian and Chinese ancestry. I say ostensibly because there are severe flaws in methodology. These are:

The definition of white British is far from simple. The report distinguishes between Irish, traveller of Irish heritage, Gypsy/Roma and Any other white background (see CSC table 2 page 13). The Any other white background is the largest. It is not clear from the report how the white British were defined, for example , a child of white immigrants might well consider his or herself white British. Who would whether they were or were not British?

The numbers of some of the ethnic minority groups cited are small, for example, at the end of Key Stage 4 (the end of GCSE courses) in 2013 there were only 168 Chinese in the country who pupils who qualified for FSM. (see CSC table 2 page 13).

3. The use of FSM as a proxy for working-class means that white British apples are being compared with variously coloured ethnic minority oranges. Most importantly the use of FSM means that the British white working-class as a whole is not represented , but only the poorest section of it. Hence, the general treatment in the media of the report, that it shows the white working-class to be falling behind ethnic minorities, is grossly misleading. The report recognises this:

…measuring working class performance in education through FSM data can be misleading. The Centre for Research in Race and Education (CRRE) drew our attention to a mismatch between the proportion of children who were eligible for free school meals and the proportion of adults who would self-define as working class:17 in 2012/13, 15% of pupils at the end of key stage 4 were known to be eligible for free school meals,18 compared with 57% of British adults who defined themselves as ‘working class’ as part of a survey by the National Centre for Social Research.The CRRE warned that projecting the educational performance of a small group of economically deprived pupils onto what could otherwise be understood to be a much larger proportion of the population had “damaging consequences” on public understanding of the issue. The logical result of equating FSM with working class was that 85% of children were being characterised as middle class or above.

The white British group will be overwhelmingly drawn from the most deprived part of that group’s population, while many of the ethnic minority groups held up as superior to the white British children , will have a large component of people who are not drawn from the lower social reaches of their society, but are poor simply because they are either first generation immigrants or the children of first generation immigrants and have not established themselves in well paid work – think of all the tales the mainstream media and politicians regale the British with about immigrant graduates doing menial jobs. These parents will both have more aspiration for their children and a greater ability to assist their children with their schoolwork.

The range of those qualifying for FSM is extensive and there is considerable complexity resulting from pupils going in and out of the qualifying criteria, viz:

(Para 12 of the report) . Of the Children are eligible for free school meals if their parents receive any of the following payments:

Income Support

• Income-based Jobseekers Allowance

• Income-related Employment and Support Allowance

• Support under Part VI of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999

• the guaranteed element of State Pension Credit

• Child Tax Credit (provided they are not also entitled to Working Tax Credit and

have an annual gross income of no more than £16,190)

• Working Tax Credit run-on—paid for 4 weeks after they stop qualifying for

Working Tax Credit

• Universal Credit

13. A report for the Children’s Society noted that the criteria for FSM mean that parents working 16 or more hours per week (24 hours for couples from April 2012) lose their entitlement to FSM since they are eligible for working tax credit; as a result there are around 700,000 children living in poverty who are not entitled to receive free school meals. In addition, not all those who may be eligible for FSM register for it; a recent report for the Department for Education estimated under-registration to be 11% in 2013. This figure varies across the country: in the North East under-registration is estimated to be 1%, compared to 18% in the East of England and 19% in the South East.

4. Greater resources, both material advantages and better quality staff, are being put into schools which have a very large ethnic minority component than schools which are predominantly filled with white British children. This is occurring both as a matter of deliberate government policy and through not-for-profit corporations such as charities.

Government policies are things such as the pupil premium . This is paid to schools for each pupil who qualifies under these criteria:

In the 2014 to 2015 financial year, schools will receive the following funding for each child registered as eligible for free school meals at any point in the last 6 years:

£1,300 for primary-aged pupils

£935 for secondary-aged pupils

Schools will also receive £1,900 for each looked-after pupil who:

has been looked after for 1 day or more

was adopted from care on or after 30 December 2005, or left care under:

a special guardianship order

a residence order

The amounts involved for a school can be considerable. Suppose that a secondary school with 1,000 children has 40% of its pupils qualifying for FSM. That would bring an additional £374,000 to the school in this financial year. At present £2.5 billion is being spent on the pupil premium.

According to a Dept of Education (DoE) investigation published in 2013, Evaluation of Pupil Premium Research Report , a good deal of this money is being spent on ethnic minorities and those without English as a first language (see tables 2.1 and 2.2, pages27 and 30) . The pupil premium can be used to provide extra staff, better staff, improved equipment after school activities and so on.

Schools can allocate the Pupil Premium money at their discretion and often make the identification of where money has gone next to impossible because they do things such as merging the Pupil Premium money with money from other budgets and joining forces with other schools in the area to provide provision (see pages 14/15 in the DoE report). It is probable that the Pupil Premium money brought into schools by white British working-class FSM children is being used, at least in part, to benefit ethnic minorities. The converse is wildly improbable.

Ethnic minorities are concentrated in particular areas and particular schools. This makes it more likely that ethnic children will go to schools with a higher proportion of free school meal pupils than schools dominated by white pupils. That will provide significantly greater funding for an ethnic minority majority school than for one dominated by white Britons, most of whom will not qualify for the Pupil Premium. .

Because ethnic minority families, and especially those of first generation immigrants, are substantially larger on average than those of white Britons, the likelihood of ethnic minority children qualifying for FSM will be greater than it is for white Britons because the larger the family the more likely a child is to qualify for FSM. This will boost the additional money from the pupils premium going to ethnic minority dominated schools.

An example of not-for-profit intervention is the charity Teach First. The select committee report (para 116) describes their work:

The Government’s response to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s first annual report noted that Teach First will be training 1,500 graduates in 2014 to 2015 and placing them in the most challenging schools, and that as of 2014/15 Teach First will be placing teachers in every region of England.

The Teach First website states: “Applicants to our Leadership Development Programme are taken through a rigorous assessment process. We select only those who demonstrate leadership potential, a passion to change children’s lives and the other skills and attributes needed to become an excellent teacher and leader. These participants teach and lead in our partner primary and secondary schools in low-income communities across England and Wales for a minimum of two years, ensuring every child has access to an excellent education.”

Apart from specific programmes such as the Pupil Premium and special training for teachers to prepare them what are euphemistically called “challenging schools” which end up disproportionately favouring ethnic minority pupils, there is also scope within the normal funding of state schools to favour ethnic minorities because head teachers have a good deal of discretion in how funds are spent. That applies with knobs on to Academies and Free Schools.

There is also a considerable difference in funding between the funding of areas with large ethic minority populations, especially black and Asian groups, and areas with largely white populations, for example, between East Anglia and London: “ The government has announced plans to raise per-pupil funding 3.7pc in Norfolk to £4,494, 7pc in Cambridgeshire to £4,225 and 2.5pc in Suffolk to £4,347 next year following a campaign by MPs.

“But councillors have called for a long term overhaul of the funding system, which will still see each student in the county receive around half of the allocation in the City of London, which will get £8,594.55 for each pupil.”

5. The effect of political correctness. With good reason any teacher, and especially white teachers, will be fearful of not seeming to be devoutly political correct. They know they are at the mercy of other teachers , parents and pupils and know that an accusation of racism from any source could well end their teaching career at worst and at best seriously disrupt their lives while a complaint is being investigated. In addition, many teachers will be emotionally attached to political correctness generally and to multiculturalism in particular.

In such circumstances it is reasonable to suspect that teachers in schools with a mix of ethnic minority and white British children will devote more time and patience to ethnic minority pupils than to white children. They may do this without conscious intent, with either fear or the ideological commitment making such a choice seem the natural one.

Such preferential treatment for ethnic minority children is facilitated by the large amount of continuous assessment involved in GCSE. (This is supposedly being reduced but the results of the change has not yet worked through to the end of a GCSE cycle. Teachers routinely help children to re-write work which does not come up to par, in some cases re-doing the work themselves . Teachers have also been caught helping pupils to cheat during exams . The opportunity and the temptation to help ethnic minority children is there and the pressure of political correctness may cause opportunity to become actuality.

6. The disruptive effect on schools of a large number of pupils from different backgrounds with English as a second language, the type of schools where the headmaster boasts “We have 100 languages spoken here”. The most likely white British children to be in such schools are those from the poorest homes which means they qualify as FSM pupils. They will be lost in these Towers of Babel not only because often they will be in the minority, but also because, unlike children with English as a second language or ethnic minority English speakers who will have a good chance of enhanced tuition, the white British FSM pupils will not enjoy such a privilege and may be actually ignored to a large extent because of the desire of the staff to assist ethnic minority children.

7 . The downplaying of British culture. The school curriculum in Britain and especially in England (where the vast majority of the British live) is shaped to reflect the politically correct worldview. This means that ethnic minority culture and history are frequently pushed ahead of British culture and history. The larger the percentage of ethnic minorities in a school, the greater will be the tendency to marginalise the white British pupils, who will almost certainly be drawn largely from those qualifying for FSM. They will be deracinated and become culturally disorientated.

To this school propaganda is added the politically correct and anti-British, anti-white propaganda which is pumped out ceaselessly by mainstream politicians and the media. This will reinforce the idea that being white and British is somehow at best inferior to that of ethnic minority cultures and at worst something to be ashamed of, something to be despised, something which is a danger to its possessor.

Conclusion

As far as the general public is concerned, the Select Committee report is saying the white working-class children – all of them not just those receiving FSM – are doing less well than ethnic minority children. The reason for this is simple, the mainstream media have reported the story in a way which would promote such a belief, both in their headlines and the stories themselves.

A comparison between the white British population as a whole and the ethnic minority populations as a whole would be nearer to reality, but it would still be comparing apples and oranges for the reasons given above. The ethnic minority children would still be likely to have on average parents who would not be representative of the ancestral populations they came from, political correctness would still drive teachers to favour ethnic minority pupils, continuous assessment would still allow teachers to illegally aid ethnic minorities, heads could still decide to divert more funds towards ethnic minorities and the promotion of ethnic minority cultures and history would still exist.

What could be done to remedy matters? Continuous assessment should stop and end of course synoptic exams substituted . Ethnic minority children should not have more spent on them than white British children. School funding in different areas should be broadly similar per capita. British culture and history should be the dominant teaching driver. Political correctness should be removed from the curriculum generally.

As for future studies, these should be controlled in a much more subtle manner than simply using FSM as a criterion. Any study of all or any part of group should control for parents’ education, income, the amount of money spent on each pupil, the teacher pupil ratio, the quality of the teachers and the general facilities of the school.

Those suggestions would not entirely cure the problem, but it would be good start to both getting at the truth and ending the demonization of the white working-class which has gathered pace ever since the Labour Party decided to drop the white working-class as their client base and substitute for them the politically correct groups of gays, feminists and most potently ethnic minorities.

4. Gross interferences with free speech such as those in the 1976 Race Relations Act and 1986 Public Order Act arising from the British elite’s determination and need (from their point of view) to suppress dissent about immigration and its consequences.

7. Such a virulent political correctness, because the central plank of the creed – race – would have been removed or at least made insignificant. Without large numbers of racial and ethnic minorities to either act as the clients of the politically correct or to offer a threat of serious civil unrest to provide the politically correct with a reason to enact authoritarian laws banning free discussion about the effects of immigration, “antiracism” would have little traction. Moreover, without the massive political leverage race has provided, political correctness in its other areas, most notably homosexuality and feminism, would have been much more difficult to inject into British society. But even if political correctness had been robbed of its dominant racial aspect whilst leaving the rest of the ideology as potent as it is now, it would be a trivial thing compared to the ideology with its dominant racial aspect intact. Changes to the status of homosexuals and women do not fundamentally alter the nature of a society by destroying its natural homogeneity. Moreover, customs and laws can always be altered peacefully. A country with large unassimilable minorities cannot be altered peacefully.

10. The creeping introduction of Sharia Law through such things as the toleration of sharia courts to settle disputes between Muslims provided both parties agree. The idea that such agreement is voluntary is highly suspect because of the pressure from within the Muslim population for Muslims to conform to Sharia law and to settle disputes within the Muslim population. But even if it was always entirely voluntary, it would be wrong in principle to have an alien system of law accepted as a rival to the law of the land because inevitably it would undermine the idea of the rule of law and further isolate Muslims from the mainstream. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10778554/The-feisty-baroness-defending-voiceless-Muslim-women.html

4. No fear of being proud of our country and Western culture generally.

5. No people being sent to prison for simply saying what they thought about race and ethnicity.

6. Much less political correctness.

7. Equality before the law in as far as that is humanly possible.

8. A stable population.

9. Plentiful housing, both rented and for purchase, at a price the ordinary working man or woman can afford.

10. Abundant school places.

11. An NHS with much shorter waiting lists and staffed overwhelmingly with native Britons. Those who claim that the NHS would collapse with foreign staff should ask themselves one question: if that is the case, how do areas of the UK with few racial or ethnic minority people manage to recruit native born Britons to do the work?

12. A higher wage economy .

13. Far more native Britons in employment.

14. No areas of work effectively off limits to white Britons because either an area of work is controlled by foreigners or British born ethnic minorities, both of whom only employ those of their own nationality and/or ethnicity, or unscrupulous British employers who use foreigners and ethnic minorities because they are cheap and easier to control.

What do our politicians think of the electorate: precious little. All the major mainstream parties either ignore or cynically misrepresent the issues which are most important to the British – immigration, our relationship with the EU, the English democratic deficit, foreign adventures , the suppression of free speech and the precarious state of the economy. . These issues are not addressed honestly because they either clash with the prevailing internationalist agenda or because to address them honestly would mean admitting how much sovereignty had been given away to the EU and through other treaties.

This antidemocratic failure to engage in honest politics is an established trait. The wilful removal from mainstream politics of vitally important issues has been developing for more than half a century. The upshot is that the British want their politics to be about something which is not currently on offer from any party with a chance of forming a government. The British public broadly seek what these days counts as rightist action when it comes to matters such as preserving nationhood, immigration, race and political correctness, but traditional leftist policies on items such as social welfare, the NHS and the economy (has anyone ever met someone in favour of free markets and free trade who has actually lost his job because of them?).

The electorate’s difficulty is not simply their inability to find a single party to fulfil all or even most of their political desires. Even on a single issue basis, the electorate frequently cannot find a party offering what they want because all the mainstream parties now carol from the same internationalist, globalist, supranational, pro-EU, pc songsheet. The electorate finds they may have any economic programme provided it is laissez faire globalism, any relationship with the EU provided it is membership, any foreign policy provided it is internationalist and continuing public services only if they increasingly include private capital and provision. The only difference between the major parties is one of nuance.

Nowhere is this political uniformity seen more obviously than in the Labour and Tory approaches to immigration. Labour has adopted a literally mad policy of “no obvious limit to immigration”. The Tories claim to be “tough” on immigration, but then agree to accept as legal immigrants more than 100,000 incomers a year from outside the EU plus any number of migrants from within the EU (350 million have the right to settle here). There is a difference, but it is simply less or more of the same. Worse, in practice there would probably be no meaningful difference to the numbers coming whoever is in power. The truth is that while we remain part of the EU and tied by international treaties on asylum and human rights, nothing meaningful can be done for purely practical reasons. But even if something could be done, for which serious party could the person who wants no further mass immigration vote? None.

A manifesto to satisfy the public

All of this set me thinking: what manifesto would appeal to most electors? I suggest this political agenda for the What the People Want Party:

We promise:

1. To always put Britain’s interests first. This will entail the adoption of an unaggressive nationalist ethic in place of the currently dominant internationalist ideology.

2. The reinstatement of British sovereignty by withdrawal from the EU and the repudiation of all treaties which circumscribe the primacy of Parliament.

3. That future treaties will only come into force when voted for by a majority in both Houses of Parliament and accepted in a referendum . Any treaty should be subject to repudiation following Parliament passing a motion that repudiation should take place and that motion being ratified by a referendum. Treaties could also be repudiated by a citizen initiated referendum (see 29).

4. A reduction in the power of the government in general and the Prime Minister in particular and an increase in the power of Parliament. This will be achieved by abolishing the Royal Prerogative, outlawing the party whip and removing the vast powers of patronage available to a government.

5. That the country will only go to war on a vote in both Houses of Parliament.

6. An end to mass immigration by any means, including asylum, work permits and family reunion.

7. An end to all officially-sponsored political correctness.

8. The promotion of British history and culture in our schools and by all publicly-funded bodies.

9. The repeal of all laws which give by intent or practice a privileged position to any group which is less than the entire population of the country, for example the Race Relations Act..

10. The repeal of all laws which attempt to interfere with the personal life and responsibility of the individual. Citizens will not be instructed what to eat, how to exercise, not to smoke or drink or be banned from pursuits such as fox-hunting which harm no one else.

11. A formal recognition that a British citizen has rights and obligations not available to the foreigner, for example, the benefits of the welfare state will be made available only to born and bred Britons.

12. Policing which is directed towards three ends: maintaining order, catching criminals and providing support and aid to the public in moments of threat or distress. The police will leave their cars and helicopters and return to the beat and there will be an assumption that the interests and safety of the public come before the interests and safety of police officers.

13. A justice system which guards the interests of the accused by protecting essential rights of the defendant such as jury trial and the right to silence, whilst preventing cases collapsing through technical procedural errors.

14. Prison sentences that are served in full, that is, the end of remission and other forms of early release. Misbehaviour in prison will be punished by extending the sentence.

15. An absolute right to self-defence when attacked. The public will be encouraged to defend themselves and their property.

16. A general economic policy which steers a middle way between protectionism and free trade, with protection given to vital and strategically important industries such as agriculture, energy, and steel and free trade only in those things which are not necessities.

17. A repudiation of further privatisation for its own sake and a commitment to the direct public provision of all essential services such as medical treatment. We recognise that the electorate overwhelmingly want the NHS, decent state pensions, good state funded education for their children and state intervention where necessary to ensure the necessities of life. This promise is made to both reassure the public of continued future provision and to ensure that the extent of any public spending is unambiguous, something which is not the case where indirect funding channels such as PFI are used.

18. The re-nationalisation of the railways, the energy companies, the water companies and any exercise of the state’s authority such as privately run prisons which have been placed in private hands.

19. An education system which ensures that every child leaves school with at least a firm grasp of the three Rs and a school exam system which is based solely on a final exam. This will remove the opportunity to cheat by pupils and teachers. The standards of the exams will be based on those of the 1960s which is the last time British school exams were uncontaminated by continuous assessment, multiple choice questions and science exams included practicals as a matter of course. .

20. To restore credibility to our university system. The taxpayer will fund scholarships for 20 per cent of school-leavers. These will pay for all fees and provide a grant sufficient to live on during term time. Any one not in receipt of a scholarship will have to pay the full fees and support themselves or take a degree in their spare time. The scholarships will be concentrated on the best universities. The other universities will be closed. This will ensure that the cost is no more than the current funding and the remaining universities can be adequately funded.

21. A clear distinction in our policies between the functions of the state and the functions of private business, charities and other non-governmental bodies. The state will provide necessary public services, business will be allowed to concentrate on their trade and not be asked to be an arm of government and charities will be entirely independent bodies which will no longer receive public money.

22. A commitment to putting the family first. This will include policies which recognise that the best childcare is that given by the parents and that parents must be allowed to exercise discipline over their children. These will be given force by a law making clear that parents have an absolute right to the custody of and authority over their children, unless the parents can be shown to be engaging in serious criminal acts against their children.

23. Marriage to be encouraged by generous tax breaks and enhanced child allowances for children born in wedlock.

24. Defence forces designed solely to defend Britain and not the New World Order.

25. A Parliament for England to square the Devolution circle. The English comprise around 80 per cent of the population of the UK, yet they alone of all the historic peoples are Britain are denied the right to govern themselves. This is both unreasonable and politically unsustainable in the long-run.

26. A reduction to the English level of Treasury funding to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This will save approximately £17 billion pa because the Celts receive overall approximately £1,600 per head per annum more than the English.

27. An end to Foreign Aid. This will save approximately £11 billion.

28. A written constitution to ensure that future governments cannot abuse their power. This will be predicated on (1) the fact that we are a free people, (2) the belief that in a free and democratic society the individual can be trusted to take responsibility for his or her actions and to behave responsibly and (3) that politicians are the servants not the masters of those who elect them. It will guarantee those things necessary to a free society, including an absolute right to free expression, jury trial for any offence carrying a sentence of more than one year, place citizens in a privileged position over foreigners and set the interests and safety of the country and its citizens above the interests and safety of any other country or people.

29. Citizen initiated referenda shall be held when ten per cent of the population have signed a petition asking for a referendum.

Those are the things which I think most of the electorate could embrace, at least in large part. There are also other issues which the public might well be brought to support if there was proper public debate and a serious political party supporting them such as the ownership and bearing of weapons and the legalisation of drugs.

The positive thing about such an agenda is that either Labour or the Tories could comfortably support it within the context of their history.

Until Blair perverted its purpose, the Labour Party had been in practice (and often in theory – think Ernie Bevin), staunchly nationalist, not least because the unions were staunchly protective of their members’ interests and resistant to both mass immigration (because it reduced wages) and free trade (because it exported jobs and reduced wages).

For the Tories, the Thatcherite philosophy is as much an aberration as the Blairite de-socialisation of Labour. The true Tory creed in a representative democracy is that of the one nation nationalist. It cannot be repeated too often that the free market internationalist creed is the antithesis of conservatism.

The manifesto described above would not appeal in every respect to ever member of the “disenfranchised majority”. But its general political slant would be palatable to that majority and there would be sufficient within the detail to allow any individual who is currently disenchanted with politics to feel that there were a decent number of important policies for which he or she could happily vote. That is the best any voter can expect in a representative democracy. People could again believe that voting might actually change things.

12 years a slave is dull, very very dull. The plot trudges from one banally brutal or degrading episode to the next as the kidnapped black freeman Solomon Northrup undergoes his dozen years of illegal enslavement in the America of the 1840s. There is little sense of the story moving forward. Rather like pornography it becomes boring because repeating the same general thing over and over is tedious no matter what the subject. Indeed, the film could be regarded as pornography for white liberals. The fact that we know the eventually outcome – Northrup’s re-obtaining of freedom- before the film begins deepens the dramatic void. The weakness of plot is typified by the scene in which Northrup is finally freed. What should have been the prime moment of emotional engagement in the film is shown in such a startlingly perfunctory fashion that Northrup’s freeing is made to seem inconsequential.

The film would have been much more dynamic as a drama if there had been subplots to vary the plantation scenes. This could have been readily done because Northrup’s written story provided plenty of opportunity for diversification of the plot – the full text of 12 Years a Slave can be found at https://archive.org/stream/twelveyearsasla00nortgoog#page/n8/mode/2up. (The page numbers in the review refer to this text). For example, when he is being shipped for sale after being kidnapped Northrup manages to send a letter to those he knows in New York (p 73), but they cannot come after him because there is no clear indication of where he is or where he will be going. Northrup also mentions in his book that his son vowed to find his father and purchase his freedom. The sufferings of his family could have been used to provide a powerful backdrop to Northrup’s travails. Then there were the opportunities for diversifying the action offered by the efforts made to obtain his freedom after he eventually gets word of his predicament and where he is to those in New York who eventually procure his release. There is also an episode in the book (p136) where Northrup goes on the run through a sub-tropical swampland. That would have made a strong action sequence.

It is a little difficult to see why the director ignored such opportunities. He is certainly a competent filmmaker as his previous decidedly interesting film Shame showed. Being black himself, perhaps McQueen was simply too close to the subject and became obsessed with the abuse storyline. Despite the dismal litany of abuse in Northrup’s book, he cannot resist using a screenplay by John Ridley which over-eggs the mistreatment of slaves by going beyond what Northrup recounted. For example, after Northrup has been abducted, he is taken with other slaves down-river on a paddle-steamer . During the voyage there is an attempt by a white man to rape one of the black female slaves. Another slave attempts to prevent this and is knifed to death by the world-be rapist. This event is not in Northrup’s book, a fact which is unsurprising because slaves were valuable and the loss of one would not be welcome. Indeed, Northrup makes it clear that any injury reduced the value of the slave and that signs of punishment could be particularly damaging to value, viz: “Scars upon a slave’s back were considered evidence of a rebellious or unruly spirit and hurt his sale” (p80) . Another important fabrication is a scene where Northrup tells Ford he is a free man who has been kidnapped into slavery and Ford says he cannot listen. Northrup’s book says he never raised the subject of his true identity with Ford (p 91)

There is also subtle exaggeration of abuse. For example, in the scene where Northrup and some other slaves are being put up for sale, the film shows them partially or fully naked, to be viewed by any prospective buyer. What Northrup actually writes is that the slaves were clothed but “Sometimes a man or a woman was taken to the small house in the yard and inspected more minutely” (p80), a rather less public humiliation.

There is also a pc driven absurdity which occurs in the scenes in the film before Northrup’s kidnapping and sale into slavery. He is shown not only as being decidedly prosperous (something not borne out by his own account of his pre-slave days) but as being greeted by virtually every white person he meets with that curious passive aggressive fawning behaviour which white liberals adopt when interacting with anyone who is black. Even allowing for the fact that Northrup is a free man and the scenes are set in the non-slave states, it is somewhat difficult to imagine that he would have been such an object of unalloyed admiration in the 1840s.

To the one-dimensional plot can be added a general absence of character development. The problem starts with the leading man Chiwetel Ejiofor in the role of Northrup. There is a curious passivity about this actor no matter what role he inhabits. Here he simply comes over as emotionally flat even when he is resisting abuse. Nor does Ejiofor resemble Northrup in appearance. From the illustration of Northrup which accompanied his book he had a darkish skin but distinctly European features. This is unsurprising because in the book he is described as a mulatto ( strictly of half white, half black ancestry but more loosely of mixed race). Chiwetel Ejiofor is the child of two Nigerian parents. He looks very different from Northrup. Was an actor who showed no signs of having a large admixture of white blood in him deliberately chosen because the film maker wanted to have no racial ambiguity in the film’s male lead?

Then there is his physique. Northrup is depicted as a physically powerful man in the film, yet according to his book he is only 5’ 7” tall (p311). That would have been rather small even by the standards of the day. Sadly for the film, physically larger does not equal greater screen presence.

Lupita Nyong’o character of Patsey is very slight if viewed unsentimentally and exactly what she has done in the role to be nominated for best supporting actress at the Oscars and to win the same award at the Golden Globes is mystifying in terms of performance. She does not spend that much time on screen or have a great deal to say. Her most notable scene is of her being savagely flogged. Her beating has provoked much comment amongst the critics, but in truth the violence in film is not way beyond that seen in other slave-themed films such as Mandingo and Drum in the 1970s and the recent Django Unchained. Apart from the brutal flogging of Patsey, the only other serious beating is that given to Northrup with a wooden paddle and whip soon after he has been kidnapped. The three other films I mention all arguably had more scenes of violence meted out to slaves. For example, Django Unchained has two slaves fighting to the death for amusement of their masters and another slave killed by setting dogs on him.

Michael Fassbender is always watchable but as the harsh slaveowner Edwin Epps he is little more than a cartoon villain whose acts of brutality lacks credible motivation. His obsession with Patsey lusting after her one minute, having her flogged the next, is unconvincing, not least because she is no great beauty. I suppose it could be represented as sexual gratification through sadism, but that is not very plausible because much her beating is in response to the urging of his wife. Mary. Sarah Paulson as Epps’ wife is good as far as her role goes, which not far because she is there to display jealousy of Patsey and urge Epps to beat the unfortunate slave at every opportunity and do precious little else. Northrup’s estimation of her is surprisingly generous: “Mistress Epps was not such an evil woman after all. She was possessed of the devil, jealousy. It is true, but aside from that there was much in her character to admire…. She had been well educated at some institution this side of the Mississippi ; was beautiful and accomplished and usually good humoured. She was kind to all of us but Patsey… (p198). Thisis not reflected in the film.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the “liberal” slave owner Ford is unconvincing on a level of basic acting because he struggles dreadfully with an American accent. But there is also a more major problem, that of Ford’s representation in the film being less than faithful to Northrup’s remarkably glowing judgement of him, viz: “. “there never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man than William Ford….He was a model master, walking upright according to the light of his understanding and fortunate was the slave who came into his possession. Were all men such as he, slavery would be deprived of more than half its bitterness.” (p90). In the film Ford appears as comparatively humane but weak and a hypocrite who uses the Bible to justify slavery.

Then there is Brad Pitt as Samuel Bass, the man who sends Northrup’s letter to those who know him in New York, a letter which brings about Northrup’s release from slavery. Bass in is an itinerant Canadian mechanic and general jack-of-all-artisan trades. Against stiff competition Bass is the most unconvincing character in the film because he seems painfully like a modern right-on Hollywood liberal. He is shown preaching at length to the slave-owning class including Edwin Epps about the evils of slavery and being met with remarkably little critical response. This is how Northrup’s book portrays him, but it does seem to be wildly improbable if one takes Northrup’s description of Epps’ wildly erratic and violent behaviour seriously.

The general veracity of the film is dubious because it treats Northrup’s account as the gospel truth. After I saw the film I read the whole of 12 Years a Slave. The impression I was left with was that it has strong elements of implausibility because some things did just not ring true when set in the context of Northrup’s time and place. Nor does the literary style seem natural.

To begin with he routinely uses the Obama trick (found in great excess in Dreams from my father) of producing long passages of supposedly reported verbatim speech relating from the time just before he was kidnapped to the end of his enslavement. These cannot possibly be a factually true record because Northrup kept no journal during his captivity and wrote his book years after most of the conversations occurred. The second general problem is that this is just Northrup’s account. Apart from the fact that it is unverified, there is a great deal of Northrup constantly representing himself as being referred to by whites and blacks alike as being a very superior type of black and boasting of his own abilities. This looks suspiciously like egotism.

To this puffing of himself there is the strange way in which despite trying to run away and several times assaulting a white man in authority over him, the carpenter cum overseer John Tibeats (played by Paul Dano), Northrup remains alive. Northrup’s account says that he not only fought with Tibeats twice (pps 109, 188) – only one incident is covered in the film), but also had a struggle with Epps (p288). His escape from death or even a savage beating is made all the more astonishing because Tibeats owned Northrup at the time of their fights, Ford having sold him to Tibeats (after owning him for little more than a year) to settle a debt he owed Tibeats (p 106). If one takes Northup’s general tale of abuse by slave owners at face value this is astonishing.

Some of the artificiality of the book may have arisen from the fact that it was not Northup’s unassisted work . How literate Northrup was is debatable and he was assisted in the writing of the book by two white men, the writer and lawyer David Wilson and Henry Northup, the head of the Northup family which had owned and freed Northup’s father (http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/12-years-a-slave.php). The involvement of Wilson and Henry Northrop may have coloured what Solomon Northrup said of his time as a slave, perhaps exaggerating the good behaviour and righteousness of anti-slavers and demonising slave owners and the white men working for them. Based on the characters depicted amongst the slave owners and traders, there is even a good case for saying the book was moulded to present the anti-slavery case both in terms of its inhumanity but also to give some of the slave owning class at least a partial absolution from being part of the “peculiar institution” by providing examples of relatively humane treatment such as that of Ford.

Finally, there is the problem of a complete absence of context, namely, a failure to place the behaviour of slave owners and traders in the broader setting of the customs of the time generally and in particular of the way the free poor of the time lived and, to modern eyes, the gross cruelties to which they were often subjected. ( A charge often levelled against William Wilberforce was that he cared a great deal about slaves but nothing for the poor in England).

Take corporal punishments, examples of which in the film have produced a great deal of anguish amongst reviewers. The flogging of slaves seems brutal to modern eyes but would have been much less likely to cause disgust amongst the general public in both the USA and Britain in the early Victorian period (the time of Northrup’s abduction). Heavy duty flogging was still commonplace in the British army and Royal Navy (and the press gang was lavishly used to man the Royal Navy until the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815) and was used widely as a judicial punishment. In addition, beating was routinely used in schools and in the home, both on children and wives.

There was a good deal more in the society contemporary with the time of Northrup’s enslavement which revolts modern sensibilities. Bear and bull baiting and dog fighting were only outlawed in Britain in 1835 and bare-knuckle boxing was very popular not merely amongst the poor but also the gentry. Executions, which involved a good deal of cruelty because simple hanging by suspension was used, were conducted in public (and attracted huge crowds). The number of crimes which attracted the death penalty in England until the late 1820s numbered over 200 and transportation to Australia was still going strong in the 1840s. The threat of imprisonment for debt hovered over all but the seriously rich, for even the middle classes could be rendered penniless by misfortune or recklessness.

Then there was the general condition of the poor. To be needy in early Victorian Britain was to live a very precarious life and those who were reduced to taking advantage of the 1835 Poor Law suffered such things as the separation of man and wife, child and parent. Trade Unions were illegal and women who worked were frequently forced into sexual acts by employers or others who had authority over them .

The poor had the advantage of being free, or at least of having made a choice to be less than free when they enlisted as a soldier or sailor or chose to enter the workhouse, but often the choice was between starving or the result of signing up to something the person did not understand or done under the influence of drink

What is startling are the remarkably large number of individual abuses of the poor which match those found in the type of chattel slavery which existed in the USA. That is not to say the free poor were as grievously handicapped as slave, for formal unfreedom is a heavy burden to bear, but merely to explain that the material distance between American slaves and the poor was not unimaginably great and in some cases, especially the house slaves of the rich. The material circumstances of the slaves would have been better than many of the free poor.

We are now deep into the film awards season. The response so far has been less than ecstatic for 12 Years a Slave. For a film lauded to the skies by the critics both in America and Britain, it has not swept all before it as might be expected: in the two sets of awards given out so far 12 Years a Slave has received a underwhelming response. It won only a single Golden Globe for best picture (voted for by members of the world’s media who call themselves the Hollywood Foreign Press Association). The Screen Actors Guild awards (voted for by actors) was even less overwhelmed and gave only the best supporting actress award to Lupita Nyong’o for her depiction of Patsy. As for those awards still pending after nominations have been made, 12 Years a Slave was not the most nominated film for either the BAFTAs, (nine nominations against Gravity’s ten) or the Oscars (nine nominations) coming behind American Hustle and Gravity with ten nominations apiece.

Nominations for film awards are one thing; voting for what you actually think is best quite another. Those who make nominations will be at least ostensibly politically correct and films such as 12 Years a Slave are for that reason more or less guaranteed to make a strong showing in the nominations. But having done their pc duty by nominating many of those entitled to vote will vote for who they actually believe should win. This will often mean that, as with the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild , the nominations bear little fruit when it comes to who wins.

Judged purely on the grounds of quality the film deserves, little praise official or otherwise for it is a truly ordinary film judged as a drama and dishonest as an historical record.

Note added 4 March 2014

12 Years a Slave won only a single Golden Globe for best picture. The BAFTAs saw it collect the best film and best actor awards while the Oscars gained it a three awards for best film, best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay. This was a poor return for a film which was the subject of a huge unofficial PR campaign by critics. The sparseness of the awards suggests tokenism.

Does the ignorance of voters matter in a system of representative democracy? Somin thinks it has very serious consequences because it leads voters to make “wrong” decisions and laments the low level of political knowledge in the USA. (I put wrong in inverted commas because unfortunately he has a political bias which often makes him equate wrong with “these are not my politics” which are broadly liberal left. This seriously taints his work). The book is primarily concerned with the effects and implications of voter ignorance on the American political system, but has implications for any political system, democratic or otherwise, for as anyone who follows politics closely will be only too well aware political ignorance is not restricted to voters but afflicts politicians and their advisors.

Listen to a vox pop or phone-in on a political subject and the ignorance of the general public can be startling when it comes to the detail of politics, not least because educated respondents are frequently as at sea with political subjects as the uneducated. Somin cites a large number of prime examples of crass political ignorance amongst Americans. For example, two 2006 polls respectively found that only 42% of Americans could name the three branches of the federal government, the executive (President), legislature (Congress) and judiciary (Supreme Court) and only 28% could name two or more of the five rights guaranteed by the first amendment (p19). As for specific policies, a 2010 survey showed that 67% of the population did not know that the economy had grown the previous year, despite the economy being judged as one of the most important policy areas by Americans (p21).

This may be dismaying at first glance, but in practice it is irrelevant how limited is the detailed political knowledge of an electorate. This is because no individual, however diligent, erudite, insightful and intelligent, could be seriously knowledgeable about all but a very small proportion of the problems and policies arising in a minimalist state constructed on the Hayek model, let alone the vast ocean of policy areas which are covered in the modern industrial state. That would apply even if political power was devolved. Indeed, in a devolved situation (and Somin is strongly in favour of devolved power) the position could be even worse because there could be more to know and understand with multiple jurisdictions to vote for on important issues.

Does this mean that representative democracy should be done away with? Not a bit of it. Even though he is worried about democratic outcomes based on ignorance and sceptical about the chances of improving political knowledge amongst voters, Somin in the end comes down in favour of it: “Despite political ignorance, democracy retains many advantages over rival systems of government.” (P199).

Indeed it does. Whether electors can make considered decisions on all matters or even the vast majority of issues is not really the point of representative democratic politics. What matters is the fact that such a political system can best restrain the naturally abusive tendencies of elites and provide by far the best legal mechanisms for the formal and peaceful transition of power, something which makes coups and civil war much less probable.

Voters can meaningfully answer the big political questions. They can oppose mass immigration on the rational ground that this is an invasion of territory which utterly changes their country. They can say whether they want their country to go to war. The can approve or disapprove of whether political correctness should or should not be part of their country’s legal system. They can say whether they feel more comfortable with a welfare state or no welfare state. They can make a meaningful choice on whether they wish their country to be part of a supranational bloc such as the EU. They can decide what punishment should be meted out to criminals. They can say yea or nay to whether essential industries should be in public hands. Electors can also make purely rational decisions (for example, those made simply on arithmetical grounds) on competition for resources, for example, it is perfectly rational to oppose immigration on the grounds that it increases competition for housing, education, jobs and welfare.

The fact that voters’ answers to such questions, if they were ever allowed to vote on them in referenda, would generally run contrary to the wishes of elites in countries such as the USA and Britain and are routinely thwarted by those elites, tells us that the real reason voters are denied the chance to directly make decisions about policy is not that they are incapable of doing so on many major issues, but rather that the opinions of voters are opposed to those with power, wealth and influence.

A major problem with the book is the fact Somin wants politics to be a science, to have an objective reality like physics. In the long distant past when I was a history and politics undergraduate I had to take a compulsory course entitled Modern Political Analysis. This involved flow charts, graphs and formulae which purported to elevate the study of politics to the level of a science. Politics students were solemnly expected to take seriously, say, a flow chart which started with a box marked electorate, had boxes marked with words such as election and government before ending with a box marked democratic outcome (I kid you not). Democracy and Political Ignorance is cut from the same misdirected intellectual cloth, nothing like so crudely but still in a marvellously wrongheaded manner which assumes that the democratic process can be reduced to quantifiable data. He even has a few formulae such as this gruesome example:

“Assume that UV equals utility of voting, CV equals the cost of voting and D equals the expected difference in welfare per person if the voter’s preferred candidate defeats her opponent. Let us further assume that this is a presidential election in a nation with three hundred people,, that the voter’s ballot has only a one in one hundred chance of being decisive , and the they voter values the welfare of his fellow citizens an average of a thousand time less than his own. .. thus we get the following equation D(300 million/1000)/ (100 million) – CV = Uv (p67).

That is the general error of the book, to imagine that human behaviour can be reduced to a miscellany of objective fact which can be used to determine how people should (or even would of necessity) behave if only they were in full possession of these facts. This matters greatly because the vast majority of political decisions have no objective truth or falsity.

The particular mistakes Somin makes are to imagine that there is such a thing as perfect information which leads to objectively right answers to political questions and to approach the subject of political ignorance from a politically correct starting point, something he banally and tiresomely signals by assiduously alternating she and her with he and his as a generic term for humanity throughout the book.

It is true that Somin attempts to give an appearance of even-handedness, splattering his analysis with qualifications, but somehow he always comes down on the liberal left “right on” side. Take the question of judicial review to which he devotes an entire chapter. He hums and haws over how undemocratic this is because it overrides the majority will but in the end concludes “Once we recognise that ignorance is a pervasive element of modern democracy, the counter-majoritarian difficulty turns into a much less than previously assumed.” This is because “Much of the legislation subject to judicial review is not actually the product of informed democratic consent.” (p169).

His political correctness also drives him to the conclusion that some political knowledge can be damaging: “Why might political knowledge exacerbate the harm caused by an electorate with bad values? Consider an electoral majority that is highly racist and wants to inflict as much harm as possible on a despised racial minority. If such racist voters become more knowledgeable about the effects of government policies, they might force elected officials to implement policies that increase the minority group’s suffering.” (P54).

That might seem a reasonable position at first glance, but a few moments consideration will reveal the dangers involved in it. What would constitute racism? After all, governments of all colours routinely favour incidentally or deliberately one group over another, whether the group be defined by race, ethnicity or class. At the present time governments in the Western world, and especially the USA, have favoured the have over the have-nots in their economic policies. This means the poor have been most disadvantaged by the policies. Ethnic and racial minorities tend to be poorer on average than the majority population, Does that mean the policies are racist? Trying to objectively define what was racist behaviour by a government would in practice would be impossible because inevitable judgements would be highly subjective. A real can of worms.

Somin gives a further hostage to fortune when it comes to subjectivity with ‘This book does not provide a defense of any particular vision of political morality. But unless we adopt the view that all values are equally good – including those of racists and Nazis [note that he does not include Marxists who have been responsible for far more deaths than the Nazis] – we must admit that good political knowledge might sometimes be put in the service of “bad” values.’ (p55)

Political correctness also damagingly colours Somin’s judgement of what is a fact. Two examples. First, he claims that the mistreatment of blacks in post slavery USA was in part built on the belief of whites that blacks were prone to excessive criminality and every black man was just waiting to rape white women; second, that hostility towards homosexuals and lesbians is in part the result of ignorance about the likelihood that sexual orientation is genetically determined (p10).

The danger with overt human reasons is that they are often a mask for the real covert ones. Hence, whether post-slavery white America did genuinely fear black criminality is not necessarily the real issue. Human beings will use justifications for likes and dislikes which are not the real reasons for their choices when they feel either that they simply do not like something without having any clear idea why (everyone has probably experienced an immediate dislike for someone as soon as they have been introduced) or are afraid for legal and social reasons that their motivation for holding a view would be unacceptable or even dangerous for them if expressed. That is the position with anything which is deemed non-pc today . Whites in the old slave owning states may have used any number of rationalisations for segregation post-slavery, while their actual motivation was that they did not see blacks as their equals or, more fundamentally, simply as different, as not part of the national American “tribe”. There is, incidentally, nothing inherently irrational about that. Human beings have, as do all social animals, an innate desire to associate with those whom they see as sharing the same characteristics as themselves. Ultimately, humans are driven by desires not reason because it is from emotions that motives arise. If this were not so, humans would be automata.

Another serious problem with Somin’s examples of false information is that he routinely presents baldly asserted or weakly supported opinions as either hard fact or as having a high probability of being true. His position on homosexuality and lesbianism is a good example. There is no conclusive evidence that homosexuality or lesbianism are genetically determined, but even if it was so proven it would not mean that it was irrational to dislike such behaviour or feel uncomfortable with its existence. There could be sound evolutionary reasons why people are hostile to homosexuality and lesbianism, for example, the rejection of the individual who does not breed and help the continuation of the “tribe”. That does not mean there should be persecution of gays and lesbians. Rather, it is a plea to not to pretend that something is an objective fact when it is not.

There is also the fundamental difficulty of how any objectively true information could exist in some instances. Take Slomin’s post-slavery claim. It is not irrational to have a fear that an enslaved group once set free might wreck physical revenge on the group which had held them enslaved. That being so, it is difficult to see how American whites who believed that could have their fears assuaged by more knowledge. In the nature of things there could be no such knowledge available to decide the question of whether freed slaves and their descendants would be violently criminal if left to live without any strict social control, for that knowledge could only exist by testing the matter with the removal of the repressive conditions under which blacks lived. If whites feared mayhem would result if such conditions were removed, they could not make a rational decision to end those conditions. In this context it is worth noting that there has been a considerable growth in the number of violent crimes perpetrated by blacks on whites in the USA since the civil rights movement and the end of segregation in the 1960s and they are now pro rata hugely greater in number than crimes of violence committed by whites on blacks (http://www.examiner.com/article/federal-statistics-of-black-on-white-violence-with-links-and-mathematical-extrapolation-formulas). There is also the experience of post-Apartheid South Africa where black murders of whites, and particularly white farmers, has been considerable. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22554709).

None of this is to argue for slavery or segregation. I am simply examining the situation from the viewpoint of the mental state of whites, especially those in the slave states, after the end of slavery. Whether or not their fears were justified is not the issue. What matters is that it would be a rational fear and, indeed, it was precisely the fear expressed in all the cases of ending slavery or other forms of unfreedom, from the British ending of slavery to the freeing of the serfs in Russia.

Somin also has a full blown faith in laissez faire economics. That might seem to sit oddly with his political correctness but, that ideology does not have a fixed menu. Its core ancestral beliefs are the triad of race, gay rights and feminism, of which race is by far the most toxic and is the springboard which has allowed the other parts of political correctness to develop and grow. However, other things have been added over the past forty years. One of those is a belief in laissez faire economics and free trade (the two are distinct for free trade merely means the exchange of goods and services produced between radically different economic systems). That laissez faire and free trade are an integral part of political correctness at present can be readily seen from the fact that support for globalism (which of course includes free movement of peoples and the undermining the nation state) is now a core part of political correctness. That does not mean laissez faire and free trade will remain a core part and, indeed, I see the first signs of the pc wind changing on the matter of economics, but it is as yet a nascent development.

Somin’s belief in it provides another example of a highly contentious claim which is effectively unsupported – he merely says it is the opinion of most economists “…voters who support protectionist policies in the erroneous expectation that they will benefit the economy as a whole rather than weaken it will also end up undermining their own goals” (p6)

The reality is that historically, protectionism has often been very successful, for example, the British industrial revolution occurred behind one of the most comprehensive and successful protectionist walls in the shape of the Navigation Acts and the Old Colonial System the world has ever seen. All the countries which followed the British lead most successfully did so behind protectionist barriers.

Interestingly, Somin does not address the fact that it is not just a lack of interest or education which stops people becoming politically knowledgeable, but also lack of innate qualities such as intelligence, intellectual inclination and extroversion. Perhaps that is because his politics debar him from believing that people will or will not do or be something because that is the way they are born. That would fit into his modern liberal mindset. IQ is particularly important because the lower the IQ the less ability to handle abstractions or complex data. This is not a trivial matter because at least ten percent of the population of Western states have IQs of 80 or less . That is the level which most psychologists working in the field of IQ believe that a person begins to struggle to live an independent life in an advanced modern society.

Somin is much taken with the concepts of rational ignorance and rational irrationality. Rational ignorance is the idea that voters do not devote time to educating themselves about political issues because they make a rational decision that their votes will count for next to nothing. I sincerely doubt whether anyone actually makes a decision to remain ignorant on that basis, although they may use it as an excuse for being politically ignorant.

But even if voters did make a considered decision to remain ignorant it would not self-evidently be a rational decision. To begin with there are many electoral circumstances where a vote is important. That is true where the electorate is small or a seat is marginal. Under the first past the post system used in Britain there are a considerable number of seats where the main party candidates are near enough in their support to make voting a far from redundant business. But even where there is no main party candidate who appeals to an elector or one of the main party candidates is odds on certain to win there is still a point in voting. To begin with if turnout is persistently low it could be used by those with power to argue for a restricted franchise or even no franchise at all. Then there is the overall vote a party gets. If, for example, a party or presidential candidate gets elected with less of the popular vote than their main opponent their mandate is weakened. If all else fails, a vote for a candidate of a minor party such as UKIP in Britain, the minor presidential candidate in the USA or a spoiled ballot sends a public message about the state of elector dissatisfaction with the mainstream parties. Somin is not entirely blind to such objections, but mysteriously and annoyingly they appear to carry little weight with him.

Rational irrationality is the brainchild of the economist Bryan Caplan. The idea is that voters not only have incentives to remain ignorant but also incentives to “engage in highly biased evaluation of the information they do have” (p13). The tempting response to this is a sarcastic “Dearie me, who would have thought it?”

Pursuing the idea of rational irrationality, Somin likens the politically interested who are seriously committed to supporting political parties to fans of sports teams who support their team blindly, generally give weight to information which boosts their team and disregard that which does not. The rewards for doing so are emotional. This of course is not irrational behaviour because it is natural for human beings to indulge their “tribal” instincts and defend their position and that of their group.

Where rational ignorance and rational irrationality come together, they are to Somin’s mind the most toxic political democractic cocktail, one which could only be overcome or at least ameliorated if those pesky voters would just become “correctly” informed.

What are Somin’s solutions to reduce what he sees as the harm of voter ignorance? It is to reduce the amount which government does (with much of the slack being taken up by private enterprise) and bring as much as possible of politics to the local or regional level, viz: . “Despite political ignorance, democracy retains many advantage over rival systems of government. Nonetheless , political ignorance will probably continue to be a serious weakness of democratic government. We are unlikely to eliminate that weakness completely. [another example of the blindingly obvious] . But we can reduce its dangers by limiting and decentralising the role of government in society” p199

There are real problems with both of these policies. In a large industrialised society government of necessity has to do a considerable amount, whether that is at the local or national level. There have to be good communications for people, goods and information. A universal school system is unlikely to exist if it is not in large part funded by the taxpayer. Defence and the maintenance of law and order cannot reasonably be left to private initiatives. Foreign policy, especially for a super-power such as the USA, has wide-reaching ramifications for domestic policy and is frequently very complex to master.

As already mentioned, it would not matter how rigorously the areas of action for government were curtailed, that pruning would not come close to making the voter’s task of informing themselves sufficiently to make considered decisions when voting light enough to be practical. If the present burden of legislation was halved in countries such as the USA and Britain it would not make a blind bit of difference to the problem of political interference because there would still be vastly more for the individual to master than any individual could manage. Even in the minimalist libertarian state there would still be a good deal of legislation and government administration, far too much for any one person to master in sufficient detail to make them informed on all or even most issues. This limitation also applies to elected full time politicians.

It might be objected that the Internet has made the acquiring of information vastly simpler. That may be true, although it presupposes that people will know enough to look for what they need. But even if they find the information how is the ordinary person to know whether the information is correct or the whole truth? The answer is that they cannot possibly be expected to do so. However intelligent a person is, they are not going to be able to judge the veracity and completeness of claims from seemingly unimpeachable sources if they do not have access to the raw data on which research conclusions are made. Such data is rarely available. There is also the problem of who controls public information. If government agencies and the large media corporations are the main sources of such information, the public will only get the received opinion of the elite most of the time there being a great deal of shared ideology and collusion between the various parts of the elite: politicians and the public bodies they control, the mainstream media, big business and not-for-profit organisations such as the larger charities.

As for decentralisation of politics, the more local the decision making the smaller the pool of political talent available. This may well result in poorer decisions being made, especially where the policy is complex. It is also true that if the number of political bodies which can raise and spend taxes increases, the opportunities for corruption increase and this generally means more corruption.

Then there is the question of exactly what should be devolved from the centre. There would never be anything approaching general agreement on that. Even within the individual there would be intellectual confusion and inconsistency. Take Somin as an example. He would have a conflict between the idea of decentralisation and his politically correct view of the world. One of the reasons Somin favours the idea of decentralisation is because it offers the opportunity for foot voting, that is, a person moving from one jurisdiction to another in search of policies more to their liking, literally voting with their feet. But for someone of his political orientation, there is the unfortunate fact that the more local politics becomes, the greater the opportunity for racial and ethnic groups to exploit their dominance of an area to their advantage. It is difficult to imagine Somin thinking that federal action to enforce politically correct behaviour throughout America would be damaging or that he would readily tolerate a local jurisdiction which, for example, refused to apply equal rights laws.

Overall all Somin is gloomy about the likelihood of political knowledge increasing. He glumly points to the fact that despite rising IQ scores, educational standards and the great ease of access to information because of the Internet over recent decades, there has been little increase in political knowledge during that time (p199) or of rationality (in his terms).

Perhaps most damaging for Somin’s desire for greater political knowledge is research (which he cites) that suggests that the more knowledgeable voters are “more biased in their evaluation of new evidence than those with less prior information”( P80). If this is true – and it is very plausible because the more data someone has, the greater the material from which to construct arguments – then the whole idea of a better educated electorate producing superior outcomes falls completely to pieces.

The primary problem with democracy at present is not voter ignorance – which in any case cannot be reasonably expected to improve – is the way in which elites have hijacked the process by adopting very similar policies on all the major issues – a commitment to ever more restrictive political correctness, the use of the law to effectively ban dissent from their views, their control of the mainstream media and perhaps most damaging for democratic control, the movement of national politics to the supranational level. The most complete example of the last is the EU which now controls a remarkably wide range of policy areas in whole or part, everything from immigration to labour laws.

The answer to this is to constrain representatives both in what they promise and what they deliver or fail to deliver. This can be done in various ways, for example, by tying the representative firmly to a constituency which they have lived in for a long time, by making any candidate standing for election put forward his policy position on all the major issues, by making it illegal for any elected representative to renege on his policy as stated in an election manifesto and outlawing any system of party coercion such as the British practice of whipping MPs (that is instructing those of a party to vote en bloc in support of the party’s policy) .

There is an important book to be written about voter ignorance within a democracy. Sadly this is not it. I don’t deny that he has written a densely argued book which systematically works out his ideas. The problem is that he is completely wrong headed in his premises. Consequently, his arguments count for nothing. However, the book is worth reading as a first rate example of the attempts of those working in what are mistakenly called the “social sciences” to pretend that these subjects are bona fide sciences just like physics and chemistry and a very revealing look into the modern liberal mind.